This Day in Computer History: November 27

Today marks the anniversary of the death of the first programmer and the release of Microsoft Internet Exlorer 2.0. Read about these events and more in "This Day in Computer History", a chronology of notable events in the computer, ecommerce, and software industries on this day in history.

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This Day in Computer History

1852

Lord Byron's daughter Ada, who wrote about Charles Babbage's "analytical engine" and was credited with inventing computer programming languages, died at age 36 of uterine cancer and the subsequent treatment by her physicians through bloodletting.

1995

Microsoft released version 2.0 of its Internet Explorer (IE) web browser for Windows 3.1, featuring support for HTML cookies, HTML tables, newsgroups, SSL, and VRML. The browser was the first competitor to the Netscape Navigator web browser that had dominated the market since the birth of the internet. Microsoft gained a foothold in the market by promoting its browser as having superior encryption and privacy protection features. By the middle of 1996, IE would have as much as a nine percent foothold in the market. With version 3.0, IE would begin wresting an increasingly large share of the browser market.

2000

The e-commerce start-up E-Stamp Corporation discontinues its sale of postage over the Internet and fires a full third of its work force as the "dot-com bubble" collapses. In a press release, the company ascribes the reductions to exorbitant operating costs.

Martin Schweiger released the Space Shuttle simulator Orbiter for Windows as freeware. The simulator was unique in that gameplay was focused on the realism of the shuttle's controls, rather than on exterior views or the destination of the flight.

Microsoft once again publicly denied that it exercised monopolistic control over the operating system market or violated antitrust law in anyway in an appeal to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in which the company requested that Judge Jackson's ruling, that would split Microsoft into two smaller companies. be over-turned.

2007

Kovio Inc. announced a new method of fabricating an inorganic nFET thin-film transistor (TFT) for use in inexpensive RFID technology. The technology used ink jet printing to lay down inks containing insulators, metals, silicon, and other materials to create sophisticated multiple layered devices.

A Chronology of Computer History for the Month of November: This Day in Computer History

This series provides a daily account of what happened on this day in the history of computing and technology. It discusses developments, breaking news, new releases and global implications that occurred as a result of these ground breaking events.